Most studies on bilingual children's metalinguistic awareness assess metalinguistic awareness using monolingual tasks. This may not reflect how a bilingual's languages dynamically interact with each other in creating metalinguistic representations. We tested 33 Greek-Italian bilingual children (8-11 years) for metalinguistic awareness using…

Since the early 2000s, neurocognitive research on second language (L2) acquisition has been controversial as to how plastic the human brain is after puberty. Recent studies have extended this debate to first language loss (L1 attrition). This article gives an overview of the first event-related brain potential (ERP) studies on L1 attrition and L2…

This study investigated the predictions of two approaches to second language acquisition. According to the usage-based approach, learner knowledge results from the strengths and weaknesses of input-driven statistical learning. According to the learner-varieties approach, pragmatic communication principles and language-internal constraints play…

This dissertation examines the acquisition of object clitic placement in Standard Italian by heritage speakers (HSs) of non-standard Italian dialects. It compares two different groups of Standard Italian learners--Northern Italian dialect HSs and Southern Italian dialect HSs--whose heritage dialects contrast with each other in clitic word order.…

This volume collects empirical studies applying Conversation Analysis to situations where second, third and other additional languages are used. A number of different aspects are considered, including how linguistic systems develop over time through social interaction, how participants 'do' language learning and teaching in classroom and everyday…

Discusses the syntactic differences in expressing wishes or desires in Italian and Russian. (CFM)

Uses a quantified version of a syntactic acquisition hierarchy to compare syntactic development in second language learners to that of other components of grammar, particularly inflectional morphology. (CB)

Analysis of the spontaneous speech of English- and Italian-speaking children with specific language impairment indicated that word-final consonants adversely influenced Italian subjects' tendency to use articles. There was no evidence of syntactic differences between the language groups. (Author/CB)

Supports claim that linguistic and psycholinguistic accounts based on study of English may prove unreliable as guides to sentence processing in even closely related languages such as German and Italian. Results of a test of sentence interpretation indicate that English-speaking Americans rely overwhelmingly on word order, Germans rely on both…

The findings from a number of recent studies indicate that, even in cases of successful bilingual first language acquisition, the possibility remains of a certain degree of crosslinguistic influence when the choice between syntactic options is affected by discourse pragmatics. In this study we focussed on the use of referring expressions, prime…

The properties of one of the structures of politeness in the romance languages, the deference system connected with the use of conditional tenses, are analyzed in this paper. Although only Spanish examples are given, the conclusions also apply to French, Italian and Roumanian. The first part of the paper analyzes politeness in relation to its…

A collection of papers on contrastive linguistics includes: "Prototypes and Equivalence" (Tomasz P. Krzeszowski); "Comparing the Incomparable? English Adjectives in "-able" and Their Rendering in Modern Chinese" (Arthur Mettinger); "Classification and Distribution of Lexical Errors in the Written Work of German Learners of English" (Rudiger…